The Mongol Empire, 1206–1368: From the Onon to Four Khanates on One Animated Map

One Clan, Then Half a Continent

Around 1200 the eastern steppe was a crowded place. The Mongols of the Onon and Kherlen rivers were one people among several: the Tatars to the east, the Kereits on the Tula and Orkhon, the Merkits down the Selenga and the Naimans in the Altai. Temüjin, a minor chief who had survived his father's murder and years of poverty, beat them one after the other: the Tatars in 1202, his former patron Toghrul of the Kereits in 1203, and the Naimans at Chakirmaut in 1204. In the spring of 1206 an assembly on the Onon proclaimed him Chinggis Khan.

What followed is the subject of this map: sixty years of conquest that took his heirs to the Yellow Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Danube, and a century in which the empire turned into four khanates that fought each other, traded across all of Eurasia and fell apart in the plagues and rebellions of the fourteenth century. The map starts with the tribes and ends in 1370, when the last Yuan emperor to rule China died on the steppe and Timur took power in Samarkand.

Chinggis Khan: Xia, Jin and Khwarazm

The first settled state to feel the new army was the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia, whose emperor submitted in 1210 after the Mongols had besieged (and nearly flooded themselves out of) his capital. The Uyghurs of Turfan came over voluntarily in 1209. In 1211 Chinggis turned on the Jurchen Jin dynasty in North China, broke its army in the passes at Yehuling and, after three years of raiding, took the Jin Central Capital, Zhongdu (modern Beijing), in 1215. The Jin court had already fled south to Kaifeng; the general Muqali spent the rest of his life clearing Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong.

In 1218 Jebe destroyed Qara Khitai in Central Asia, and the Mongols suddenly bordered the Khwarazmian Empire. When the governor of Otrar massacred a Mongol caravan and the Khwarazm-shah killed Chinggis's envoys, the answer came in September 1219. Bukhara and Samarkand fell in 1220; Merv, Urgench and Nishapur were destroyed in 1221, and Jalal al-Din, the shah's son, escaped across the Indus by riding his horse into the river. Jebe and Subutai meanwhile rode round the Caspian, through Georgia and the Caucasus, and destroyed a Rus' and Cuman army at the Kalka on 31 May 1223. Chinggis died in August 1227 while his army was besieging the last Tangut capital.

Ögedei, Möngke and the Great Campaigns

Under his son Ögedei the empire finished what Chinggis had started. Chormaqan ended Jalal al-Din's revived kingdom in western Iran in 1231; the Jin made their last stand at Caizhou, which fell on 9 February 1234. In 1236 Batu and Subutai marched west: Volga Bulgaria first, then Ryazan and Vladimir in the winter of 1237–38, the Cuman steppe and the Caucasus in 1239, and Kiev on 6 December 1240. In April 1241 one column destroyed a Polish and Silesian army at Legnica while the main army beat the Hungarians at Mohi. The Mongols held the Hungarian plain for a year and withdrew after the news of Ögedei's death. In 1243 Baiju beat the Seljuks of Rum at Köse Dağ, and Rum, Georgia and Cilicia became tributaries, as the Rus' princes did when they took their patents from Batu.

Möngke, who took the throne in a coup by the house of Tolui in 1251, sent one brother to each end of the world. Kublai marched through the Tibetan borderlands and took the kingdom of Dali (Yunnan) in 1253–54. Hülegü destroyed the castles of the Nizari Ismailis, the Assassins, in 1256 and sacked Baghdad in February 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate. Then Möngke died besieging the Song fortress of Diaoyucheng in August 1259, and everything stopped. In Syria, which Hülegü had taken in early 1260, the Mamluks beat the army he left behind at Ain Jalut on 3 September 1260.

Four Khanates

Kublai and his brother Ariq Böke were both proclaimed Great Khan in 1260, and the civil war that followed lasted until Ariq Böke gave up in August 1264. By then the empire had become four states. Berke of the Golden Horde, a Muslim, had gone to war with Hülegü over the Caucasus in 1262; the Chagatayid khans in Central Asia went their own way; and from 1269 Kaidu led the Central Asian princes in a war against Kublai that lasted the rest of his life. Kublai proclaimed the Great Yuan dynasty in 1271, took Xiangyang after a five-year siege in 1273 and Hangzhou in 1276, and ended the Song at the sea battle of Yamen in 1279. His expeditions overseas mostly failed: Japan in 1274 and 1281, Đại Việt in 1285 and 1288, Java in 1293.

When Kublai died in 1294 the khanates together covered more land than any empire before them. In 1304 they made a general peace that recognised the Yuan emperor's primacy, and for a generation merchants, missionaries and envoys travelled from the Black Sea to China. The Ilkhans made peace with the Mamluks in 1323. Then the structure came down. Abu Sa'id, the last ilkhan of Hülegü's line, died without an heir in 1335, and his realm split into regional dynasties: the Jalayirids in Baghdad, the Chobanids in Tabriz, the Eretnids in Anatolia, the Injuids and Muzaffarids in Fars and Kerman, and a Chinggisid claimant, the Sarbadars and the Kartids in Khorasan. The Chagatai Khanate split in two in 1347. Plague broke out at the siege of Caffa in 1346; the Golden Horde fell into its Great Troubles after 1359, and Lithuania took Kiev at Blue Waters in 1362.

In China the Red Turban rebellion broke out in 1351. Within five years rebel regimes held most of the Yangtze valley; in 1356 a former monk, Zhu Yuanzhang, made Nanjing his base, and in the same year King Gongmin of Goryeo threw off Yuan supervision. Zhu beat his rivals one by one, proclaimed the Ming dynasty in January 1368 and took Dadu on 14 September. Toghon Temür fled to the steppe and died there in May 1370; his descendants ruled the Northern Yuan from Mongolia, and Yuan loyalists held Yunnan until 1381.

How to Read the Map

Direct Mongol rule is brick red until 1260. From the split onwards, the Yuan keeps that colour, the Golden Horde is gold, the Chagatai Khanate green (with Moghulistan, its eastern half after 1347, in a lighter green) and the Ilkhanate blue. Lighter tints of the same colours mark tributaries and vassals: the Rus' principalities, Goryeo, Tibet under the Sakya, Georgia, the Seljuk sultanate of Rum and Armenian Cilicia, plus vassal dynasties such as the Kartids of Herat and the Salghurids of Fars. Everything that was never Mongol (Western Xia, the Jin, the Song, Qara Khitai, Khwarazm, the Abbasids, the Mamluks, Delhi, Japan, Đại Việt and others) is drawn in greys, olives and slate, so strong colour always means Mongol rule; these neighbours disappear when they are conquered, and a tributary changes from grey to its overlord's tint when it submits. The same neutral tones mark the regional dynasties that replaced the Ilkhanate, the Red Turban regimes and the Ming at the end. Dark arrows show the main campaigns as they happen. Hover over a territory to see its name.

These are frontiers of power, not surveyed borders. The steppe was ruled through people, not lines, so the northern limit in Siberia is a rough edge of the taiga, and many borders follow modern provinces where the real ones are unknown. Tributary status is a judgement call: Novgorod paid tribute from 1259, Smolensk only from the 1270s (both are drawn from 1259), and Tibet's place within the Yuan state is still argued about, which is why it is shown as a tributary rather than as part of the Yuan.

How the Map Was Made

The map is built from about 115 pieces of land, from Mongolian provinces and Chinese provinces cut along the old Jin–Song frontier to Rus' principalities and Iranian provinces, each with its own dated list of rulers. Neighbours' outlines in 1205 (the Jin, the Song, Western Xia, Dali, Rum, Georgia and Cilicia) come from the Cliopatria dataset of the Seshat Global History Databank (CC BY 4.0), clipped to modern borders and the coastline. The dates and the rulers of each piece follow Christopher Atwood's Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire, Timothy May's The Mongol Conquests in World History, volume 6 of the Cambridge History of China, Thomas Allsen's Mongol Imperialism, Peter Jackson's The Mongols and the West and The Mongols and the Islamic World, Reuven Amitai-Preiss's Mongols and Mamluks and Michal Biran's study of Qaidu. About a hundred test places, from Karakorum to Acre, were checked at every one of the 57 keyframes.

Chronological Timeline

• 1203–1204 — Temüjin defeats the Kereits and the Naimans
• Spring 1206 — Kurultai on the Onon: Temüjin becomes Chinggis Khan
• 1209–1210 — The Uyghurs and Western Xia submit
• 1211 — Invasion of the Jin; battle of Yehuling
• 1215 — Fall of Zhongdu (Beijing)
• 1218 — Jebe destroys Qara Khitai
• 1219–1221 — Conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire
• 31 May 1223 — Battle of the Kalka
• August 1227 — Death of Chinggis Khan; end of Western Xia
• 9 February 1234 — Fall of Caizhou: end of the Jin
• 1236–1240 — Volga Bulgaria, the Rus', the Cuman steppe; Kiev falls on 6 December 1240
• 9 and 11 April 1241 — Battles of Legnica and Mohi
• Spring 1242 — Withdrawal from Hungary after Ögedei's death
• 26 June 1243 — Battle of Köse Dağ
• 1253–1254 — Kublai conquers Dali
• 1256 — Hülegü takes Alamut
• February 1258 — Sack of Baghdad
• 11 August 1259 — Möngke dies at Diaoyucheng
• 3 September 1260 — Battle of Ain Jalut
• 1260–1264 — Civil war between Kublai and Ariq Böke
• 18 December 1271 — Kublai proclaims the Great Yuan
• 1274 and 1281 — Invasions of Japan
• 19 March 1279 — Battle of Yamen: end of the Song
• 9 April 1288 — Battle of Bạch Đằng
• 1293 — Java expedition
• 18 February 1294 — Death of Kublai
• 1304 — Peace among the khanates
• 30 November 1335 — Death of Abu Sa'id; the Ilkhanate splits
• 1347 — The Chagatai Khanate splits
• 1351 — Red Turban rebellion
• 1362 — Battle of Blue Waters: Lithuania takes Kiev
• 14 September 1368 — The Ming take Dadu
• 1370 — Death of Toghon Temür; Timur takes power